Leading off today: Add Bishop Grimes to the list of schools that will not be able to field a varsity football team this season.
The East Syracuse school made the news official with a brief message on its football team website late last week, and that leaves Section 3 two teams short in Class D following the news that Hamilton had folded its program last week.
Olean Archbishop Walsh dropped the sport for the second straight year, making that decision early in the summer. Saratoga Catholic, Southern Springs and A. Philip Randolph have also bowed out. Geneva DeSales is continuing the sport, but as recently as the beginning of the month the future of the entire school was uncertain.
Troy Record reporter Will Montgomery (who by the way has been cranking out a ton of preseason stuff already) says a couple of Section 2 schools have been working extra hard to avoid joining the pigskin scrap heap.
Hoosic Valley coach Jay Garvey is still pulling students onto the field a week into practice to make sure the fifth-year program, which has about two dozen players right now, will have sustainable numbers this fall and down the road.
"Almost half of (our) kids have never played football before, which is pretty remarkable,” Garvey told the paper. "A lot of them are kids I have seen in school, seen in gym class, and have been lucky enough to convince to come out to play."
It's helped make up for some of the usual attrition, which included a couple of former players switching to soccer this fall, but it does come at a price.
"It’s kind of frustrating, because if we get a couple of new kids, we have to go back and re-do what we did the
